Thursday, May 31, 2007 | 7:20 a.m.
Irene Wilson, 87, lives in a modest first-floor apartment, the sort with stucco walls and a gated entrance that doesn't keep out anybody who is half-determined.
The apartment next door, from the outside, looks just like hers. But inside, according to the Metro vice detectives who raided it Monday night, it is quite different.
Police say the apartment next door is a brothel.
Wilson had no idea.
Nor did she have any idea that one of her neighbors was led handcuffed out of the apartment and charged with soliciting prostitution. Two counts.
And Wilson wasn't the only neighbor who knew nothing of the business next door, which was advertising in the back of an alternative weekly: Asian ladies on call.
Mario Beltran lives upstairs and saw men coming and going all the time, but never thought much of it.
"I just thought these girls had a lot of friends," he said.
Police found myriad condoms in the apartment, tucked next to beds by the case or already discarded. They found lubricants and lotions and red lights in the bedrooms, which were stocked with white towels.
The usual, Sgt. Victor Vigna said.
There's an arrest warrant out for another suspect.
"It's an ongoing investigation," Vigna said. So ongoing, in fact, that he can't say much more.
The apartment on Decatur Boulevard off Spring Mountain Road is the 14th brothel Vigna's team has busted in just over two months. As illegal brothels go, it's small. The raid lasted barely more than an hour and ended with undercover officers in green fatigues carrying brown paper bags out of the building: evidence for the locker.
The alleged prostitute, a woman from China with papers that say she's 39, shuffled out of the apartment in white flip flops and cropped jeans. Through a translator, she told police her current career had netted her $30,000 to send home.
The officers who arrested her must have looked familiar: They were the same men who had twice last week arranged an illicit encounter in the brothel, only to have backed out at the last minute. An undercover vice cop's confirmation.
Inside the employees were charging $150 for "full service," Detective David Hunkins said.
Services of a more specialized nature were negotiated on request.
Ducking into an undercover police car, tinted and dark, the handcuffed woman was whisked away to jail.
Lajos Patai watched, smoking on his porch. Patai said he had no idea what the women who lived across the hall were up to. He works late at the airport and doesn't talk to his neighbors.
The only thing he noticed? The women's cars: all Mercedes-Benzes. And their children, coming and going from the apartment.
"They looked like rich people," Patai's wife, Katalin, said, arms flailing. "Rich people in beautiful cars."
Katalin Patai remembered men in baseball hats hanging out in the hallway and taxicabs coming late at night. As she aligned th ose images with those of the woman's arrest, she was overwhelmed by what she missed.
Through slotted blinds, the brothel apartment appeared almost albino : white sofas, white carpet, a white coffee maker perched on a glass table. Foreign-language newspapers were on the floor. An air freshener stood in the corner. Lotion bottles lined a windowsill in one bedroom.
By 9 p.m., the vice detectives were gone, on to another investigation.
Outside, neighbors walked the halls of their apartment complex, trying to catch a glimpse of the spectacle they never knew next door.
Wilson's daughter, Anne, stood open-mouthed in the doorway of her aging mother's apartment. Anne remembered the women next door stopping to say their singsong hellos.
"We knew nothing," she said. "Absolutely nothing. There was never no noise, no sound, no nothing."
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